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Abstract

The majority of the extant languages have one of three dominant basic word orders: SVO, SOV or VSO. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this word order bias, including the existence of a universal grammar, the learnability imposed by cognitive constraints, the descent of modern languages from an ancestral protolanguage, and the constraints from functional principles. We run simulations using a multi-agent computational model to study this bias. Following a local order approach, the model simulates individual language processing mechanisms in production and comprehension. The simulation results demonstrate that the semantic structures that a language encodes can constrain the global syntax, and that local syntax can help trigger bias towards the global order SOV/SVO (or VOS/OVS).

Keywords: computational simulation, global order, local order, semantics, word order bias

@article{gong09wordOrderBias,
  author={Tao Gong and James W. Minett and William S-Y. Wang},
  title={A simulation study on word order bias},
  journal={Interaction Studies},
  year={2009},
  volume={10},
  number={1},
  pages={51-75},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/gong09wordOrderBias.html},
  keywords={computational simulation, global order, local order, semantics, word order bias}
}